


the inaccuracy of historical wartime dramas

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: interludes and conversations [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Compliant, M/M, Meta, hard emotional landings, show inside a movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was nothing wrong with <i>Howling Commandos</i>, not really. It was new and shiny, made only six months before Steve woke up and on the brink of cancellation until it was announced that Captain America was found, at which point ratings skyrocketed. Steve would have heard of the series, except that he was too busy figuring out his phone, handling alien invasions, and battling crippling depression (that he would not admit to anyone, even himself). The result was that 25 episodes later, Howling Commandos was the most popular television shows about the war on the planet, with a loyal following, and Steve was almost totally oblivious.</p><p>(or: Steve has feelings, and shouldn't ever watch television)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the inaccuracy of historical wartime dramas

**Author's Note:**

> again: this is not the fic I set out to write. It is the fic I ended up writing anyway. Because I am, as previously stated, a moron.

It could have all been avoided if Clint hadn’t told Steve one day that he knew how he and Bucky once bickered about Steve’s shield being painted like a target, because he saw it on _Howling Commandos_.

This of course led to the discussion of _what is Howling Commandos_ , which led to Clint staring at Steve blankly, which led to Steve assuring him that yes, he knew _who_ they were, but how could Clint see them when they disbanded in 1945?

Which of course, led to Clint sitting Steve down and popping in a DVD at the Hub, and Steve watching six straight episodes of a television program that starred someone named Christopher Samuels as Steve Rogers and Zachary Burrows as James Buchanan Barnes. Steve came out of the room in a kind of a shock – sure there were Captain America movies before he went under, but they all starred _Steve_ , and they were universally terrible (and also mostly destroyed from bad preservation, except for Howard’s private collection, which Tony kept in a safe under lock and key, apparently). 

There was nothing wrong with _Howling Commandos_ , not really. It was new and shiny, made only six months before Steve woke up and on the brink of cancellation until it was announced that Captain America was found, at which point ratings skyrocketed. Steve would have heard of the series, except that he was too busy figuring out his phone, handling alien invasions, and battling crippling depression (that he would not admit to anyone, even himself). The result was that 25 episodes later, Howling Commandos was the most popular television shows about the war on the planet, with a loyal following, and Steve was almost totally oblivious.

Really, that was for the best.

“Did you like it?” is the first thing that Clint asks as Steve emerges, feeling puzzled and slightly irritated.

Steve shrugs. 

~~~~~

Loneliness, it turns out, isn’t something that Steve can cure with a road trip across the country on the back of a motorcycle. It takes him a good month after the invasion of New York to finally manage a trip on his own, as he tries to figure out what he’s going to do, and he ends up in Los Angeles. It’s a hard city for Steve to like, he thinks. It’s loud and brash and colorful in all the ways New York isn’t, it’s hard to navigate and a confusing jumble of cities and counties and freeways running from surface streets onto raised bridges. 

But he finds a hotel room and remembers how much Bucky wanted to come here, once upon a time, and how when he came here to film a couple of movies it was full of orange trees and hot, stuffy studios. He goes to Disneyland and it reminds him so sharply of Howard that it hurts for a moment, to think of a man who had only been his friend for a handful of minutes but whose life had dwindled into trying to find him, into stories about Steve Rogers, into a resentment that bled into his son. 

(Steve looks at Tony sometimes and he just _wonders_ , what did Howard _do_ , what did he do to this other person to make Tony look at him like he’s an intruder? How did his jealousy of his son’s inherent brilliance turn him so sour? 

But then Tony says or does something so callous and selfish that Steve thinks he’ll never understand the man, and Tony isn’t apologizing, so it just continues that Steve disregards him and Tony ignores him, and their relationship continues to not really exist.)

And then one day he sits in a restaurant and draws for an hour and doesn’t see the crowd of people with cameras as they descend, snapping photographs of a dark-haired man as he comes through the door and tries, desperately, to get a table in the back corner of the place, the table that Steve is currently occupying. 

He does look up just in time, however, to meet the man’s eyes – they’re the kind of cornflower blue color that attract the attention of anyone with any kind of practice in color theory – and Steve’s first thought is that his smile isn’t nearly the right shape for him to be playing Bucky on television.

They stare at each other for a long time. Everyone on the planet knows that Captain America is alive – almost everyone knows what he looks like, because after the whole alien invasion finished, the rest of the team elected him to speak on their behalf on the merits that he was the most polite (true) the best spoken (debatable) and the one with the most media experience without having had, at one point, had to defend a sex tape (Natasha said, turning to give Tony a pointed look). And so he had made some terse statements, apologized for all the destruction, and assured people that Manhattan was, once again, perfectly alien-free. 

So this actor knows who he is, and he, in turn, because of Clint’s consideration, knows who the actor is, too.

And to Steve’s great surprise, the man turns a brilliant shade of red, the kind only seen on tomatoes and apples, or maybe in the heart of a very ripe watermelon. The shade of red that makes people crave something sweet and watery and crisp. He can feel his own face pinking up in response. 

“We make bets, if you watch it,” he says a moment later, and Steve is grateful that this man (Mr. Burrows, Steve thinks) doesn’t sound all that much like Bucky. 

“Which do you have money on?” Steve asks back, looking up. It’s easy. The easiest conversation he’s had, for all that he wants to close up, to try and defend himself against the dismantling of his past by whoever writes the show. It’s not this man’s fault, he thinks. He was in show business, once. He knows how it works (bonds buy bullets, bullets shoot Nazis).

Mr. Burrows sits down across the table from him, and the waiter brings him a glass of water. “That you do, but not regularly,” he says. “I think it’s probably embarrassing.”

“We didn’t cry so much,” Steve admits, one of his hands going to the top of his head, “and Bucky got out of the habit of smoking long before we left, and didn’t get back into it after,” he says, as if he’s trying to teach him something, but the fact is that he’s surprised Bucky’s name made it out of his mouth.

Mr. Burrows reaches a hand out. “Zac. Burrows. But you can call me Zac,” he adds, with a grin that must attract all kinds of trouble, but it’s still the wrong shape. Steve takes his hands and there aren’t calluses in the right places, the parts of Bucky’s hands that were hard and rough from hard work and later from the metal of his gun.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Steve says.

~~~~~

Later, Steve knows, too, that the taste of Zac’s skin is wrong. He doesn’t moan the same way when Steve’s mouth is on his cock, when they press themselves together, it’s not the same intimate knowledge of where each touch can ignite the entire world on fire. 

It’s not bad. Zac fucks into him from behind and Steve can hide his face when he orgasms, and it’s different enough that Steve isn’t surprised when the other man doesn’t ask to see him, doesn’t end the encounter with a sigh and a huff and a quiet, _aw, come on, what do you think I’m gonna laugh or something?_ before settling next to him.

It’s unsettling, still, and awkward, and Steve isn’t sure if he should kiss him the next morning when he gets his shoes to leave. 

He heads out and doesn’t think about anything as he rides up the coastline, except how long the road is, winding ahead of him, cold and empty.

~~~~~

He doesn’t think about it for a long time, after that. There’s no reason to, because he’s not really ashamed of it, and because it was just that one night. It’s not until he’s in a motel room with Natasha, and she’s curled tiny against the headboard that he turns on the TV just for the noise of it and there’s an episode of _Howling Commandos_ on.

He’s about to turn it off when Natasha gives a laugh and sits up. “This is Clint’s favorite show,” she says, touching the arrow around her neck like a prayer against maladies. They haven’t managed to get a hold of Clint – he’s so far undercover that Steve thinks even SHIELD probably doesn’t know where he is. There is no worry in Natasha’s over that fact, except sometimes a tension in her face. It’s hard to read her, even for someone with an artist’s eye. She doesn’t give away anything easily.

And that reaction is so telling that Steve leaves it on. It’s harder to manage, now. Before it was just a testament to a bygone era, a friendship that was the most critical thing in Steve’s life. Now it’s something else. It’s a glimmering glimpse of nostalgia, shimmering in the hazy confines of memory. On the show Steve is tall and golden and much more handsome than Steve considers himself to be, shyly asking Peggy Carter out to dance with a smile that Steve isn’t sure he possesses. The actress who plays Peggy is pretty but too skinny, she doesn’t possess any of the curves Peggy did, the lushness that Steve couldn’t think about without blushing, once upon a time. She doesn’t have the stature of the real Peggy Carter. She replies that yes, she would like that, shyly, her hands tucked behind her back as if she’s fighting the urge to touch him.

“It didn’t happen that way. She showed up at this bar, it was a lot dirtier than that, and I didn’t ask anything,” he says, sitting heavily on his bed. “And she definitely wasn’t shy about how she looked at me.”

Natasha just looks over. “You take the romance out of everything,” she replies quietly, but there’s that smile on her face, the one that only takes half her mouth to perform. On the screen, Bucky is clapping him on the back, congratulating him.

Zac’s face still doesn’t look right, and there’s something perverse about this now, because Steve knows that the actor knows that this entire scene was done wrong, that congratulations wasn’t what was on Bucky’s mind at the time. But to be fair, entirely, Steve isn’t particularly sure that he knows what was going on in Bucky’s head, because even Steve wasn’t sure. Bucky was cagey during that part of the war, on edge and distracted, hard to understand.

“We were jerks to each other,” Steve says, suddenly. “He would call me a different name every day of the week. He was constantly yelling at me.”

“Did you expect the show to be right?” Natasha asks, her eyes fixed on the screen. Bucky on the screen is smoking a cigarette and talking about some made-up event where he and Steve fought over a girl. There was nothing like that in real life. There was no girl to fight over – if Steve showed interest in any girl, Bucky would back off, but it wasn’t really much of a problem. “It’s television.”

Steve isn’t sure what he expects. 

(He expects that when people say _James Buchanan Barnes_ they see the same man he saw, the man who was there for the entirety of this life, who taught him how to throw a punch, who groaned at him to stop starting stupid fights, who made him sleep on his couch for a whole month after his mother died, and who moved in with Steve after under the claim that his mother was driving him crazy, who Steve kissed for the first time in the woods outside of Austria, when they were cold and miserable, and who didn’t kiss him back until three weeks later, and who acted like he was holding his breath the entire goddamn time.)

~~~~~

It was a product of the war, but they were all products of the war. Love didn’t fit easily into that sort of life, it wedged itself into the corners of love letters, photographs of sweethearts left at home, and in between the lines of condolences, sent back with a signature and sometimes a check. Everyone talked a big game but they were kids and young men, innocence about the world robbed by the German war machine.

And if Steve is honest, that’s what makes him the most angry when the night before he and Sam are going to leave for who-knows-where to look for the battered remains of his best friend, when he turns the television on to drown out the fear in his head, and _Howling Commandos_ is on a new episode.

It’s shiny and gritty in a way the war wasn’t. Steve remembers picking up soldiers who were drunk, sobbing about the fear, sick with it, but out there trying their best not to let it show. On the television, the soldiers are world-weary; Jones and Dugan sitting around a trench, chain-smoking and talking bitterly about a world that betrayed them. 

And then there’s Bucky. It’s a later season, it’s a new episode (they say it’s the last season, that this season will end with Steve plunging a plane into the Arctic, or that’s what Sam says, Sam, who doesn’t watch this show because it gives him the shakes) and Zac looks older now, his face is lined with something that Bucky’s face never showed. Bucky is picking up his sniper rifle on the screen, and saying that he wishes he had a sweetheart back home, but then he thinks it’s better he doesn’t, that she would just hate getting the letter that he was dead. Like it was an eventuality; as though there was no cure for war except to go down swinging. _The truth is,_ he says, shouldering his gun (although Steve doesn’t remember them having that much ammunition, they scraped for all the spare bullets they could find, and he definitely doesn’t remember having as much food as they seem to have, cooked in something that wasn’t a tin can) _none of us are getting out of this alive, and even if we do, it’s not like we’ll be human anymore._

It’s the last straw, to hear that. He doesn’t remember taking the television apart with his bare hands, but then there he is, sitting in the wreckage of it and feeling sick about it (it was expensive, it belonged to Sam, it was not his, and it’s not appropriate to feel his rage so close to the surface) and seething at the bad writing, at the sheer audacity that Bucky would _ever_ think that, much less say it, Bucky, whose death should have meant more to these people than just the illusion of his bitterness and his fear. 

Bucky, whose death heralded the end of the war in way a trumpet would never manage.

Bucky, whose last choice was to give his life for his country before all the choices were taken from him and he was weaponized, turned into something that Bucky would hate, stripped of everything that made him Bucky and stripped of everything that made him _Steve’s_.

Love didn’t fit into their lives easy. 

“What?” Sam asks, and Steve realizes he said it out loud, and he looks up. Sam has a look on his face like he only half-believes what he walked in on, but the other half is pure counselor, that same patient expression he had at the VA. Steve doesn’t like it – but only because he doesn’t want Sam to feel like his counselor. Sam is his friend, not his doctor.

“Love didn’t fit into our lives,” he repeats, his head ducked. “Sorry about your TV.”

“I know it was a bad show, man, but really, you could have just turned it off,” Sam says, reaching down to pick up the remains. “I guess we’ll have to go to a bar to watch the Superbowl, then.”

They clean the mess up, and Steve apologizes again, and promises to get Sam a new one, but Sam shrugs it off. “I guess when Captain America breaks your TV, you just think well, I was probably watching too much of it anyway,” he says with a sigh. “I’m just glad you didn’t watch _How I Met Your Mother_ , the ending to that one would have probably had you launching it into the Potomac.”

Steve looks at Sam and then he laughs, and laughs. He doesn’t know what _How I Met Your Mother_ is, except a show, but it’s something so natural, something so much like what Bucky would say, that it makes Steve feel like the hole inside of him is patching up, if only for a moment.

Sam looks surprised. “You’re losing it, man,” he says.

“I used to call him an idiot,” Steve says. “The first thing I thought when I saw him on that bridge – I almost said it, too,” he adds, like he can’t stop talking, “was what would the girls in Brooklyn think about his stupid looking hair, it was probably a good thing he spent all his time with a mask on.”

“You’re twisted,” Sam says, but he’s smiling, like he understands.

Steve’s smile feels warm, it makes him feel right, for the first time in a long time. “He got me.”

Sam just nods, congenially. “That show’s a piece of crap. Mostly it’s still on because the girls on the internet – and no offense here, man – watch it because they like to convince themselves that Steve and Bucky _on the show_ ,” he adds, like this next part is offensive, “are you know. Having sex.”

Steve goes silent for a moment, and then he really laughs, laughs until he cries, and Sam shakes his head and says something about how it’s always the quiet ones, and when Steve finally manages to stop, he wipes his face, and thinks, well.

Wouldn’t Bucky get a kick out of that.

**Author's Note:**

> AND THEN THEY FOUND BUCKY AND STEVE MADE HIM WATCH THIS AND HE AND BUCKY RAGGED ON THE SHOW FOREVER AND WROTE THE PRODUCERS WITH A LAUNDRY LIST OF WHAT THEY GOT WRONG


End file.
